this sensation, but he had written
"copy" for fifty printed pages on that day, and his brain was breaking
down. Of course psychology has explanations. The scene _may_ have
really occurred before, or may be the result of a malady of
perception, or one hemisphere of the brain not working in absolute
simultaneousness with the other may produce a double impression, the
first being followed by the second, so that we really have had two
successive impressions, of which one seems much more remote in time
than it really was. Or we may have dreamed something like the scene
and forgotten the dream, or we may actually, in some not understood
manner, have had a "prevision" of what is now actual, as when Shelley
almost fainted on coming to a place near Oxford which he had beheld in
a dream.

Of course, if this "prevision" could be verified in detail, we should
come very near to dreams of the future fulfilled. Such a thing--
verification of a detail--led to the conversion of William Hone, the
free-thinker and Radical of the early century, who consequently became
a Christian and a pessimistic, clear-sighted Tory. This tale of the
deja vu, therefore, leads up to the marvellous narratives of dreams
simultaneous with, or prophetic of, events not capable of being
guessed or inferred, or of events lost in the historical past, but,
later, recovered from documents.

Of Hone's affair there are two versions. Both may be given, as they
are short. If they illustrate the deja vu, they also illustrate the
fond discrepancies of all such narratives. {24}

THE KNOT IN THE SHUTTER

"It is said that a dream produced a powerful effect on Hone's mind.
He dreamt that he was introduced into a room where he was an entire
stranger, and saw himself seated at a table, and on going towards the
window his attention was somehow or other attracted to the window-
shutter, and particularly to a knot in the wood, which was of singular
appearance; and on waking the whole scene, and especially the knot in
the shutter, left a most vivid impression on his mind. Some time
afterwards, on going, I think, into the country, he was at some house
shown into a chamber where he had never been before, and which
instantly struck him as being the identical chamber of his dream. He
turned directly to the window, where the same knot in the shutter
caught his eye. This incident, to his investigating spirit, induced a
train of reflection which overthrew his cherished theo